Monday, April 25, 2011

Zero Out!

Recently I made a link on Facebook to a post photographer Joe McNally did on his blog. It was about common mistakes using a camera. It's a great post. One he mentioned was "Don"t use yesterday's settings". Zero out your camera before you go out. That's a smart idea, one so good I had come up with it myself and have suggested to people before. It's a habit that has to be formed and one day I will have it. When I've been driving to work the past few days I've been noticing the Mountains on the North Shore of Vancouver. The Lions have been looking pretty awesome in the first morning light with all the snow on them. Yesterday they looked pretty good, not a cloud in the sky so I found a spot and grabbed a few shots. Later at work I took the photo's for yesterday's post. This morning the Lions were absolutely dramatic with the stormy clouds around them and the golden sunlight shining on spots. So I went to the same spot as yesterday and started shooting. Click, crap. Click, crap, crap, crap, crap. I couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong, it just didn't look right and the light was changing.... Then the bulb went on and I checked the settings. I was using settings I made for the photo's of Lindsay.

I used the 70-210 at 210mm 1/160th sec f6.3 iso 100. Once I got the settings right that is.